Retro-game (OT)

[Barry Arrowsmith]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, Constance Vigilance <constancevigilance at y...> 
wrote:
>    
>   Me, too. My bad Mac experience was a police department where we standardized on 
Macs networked to a hosting minicomputer with our police data (it happened to be a Vax). 
We were part of a neighborhood network (sneaker-net type) of police sharing data. My 
assignment was to get the data off our VAX and send it to the master computer. Problem. I 
could see the data on my Mac. But whenever I clicked on the icon (a requirement since 
there is no such thing as a command line), it would start up our VAX-to-Mac interface 
protocol. I could not figure out how to get to the raw data. I called Apple and they sent 
over a specialist. I pointed to the data and handed him a floppy. Put this data on this 
floppy, please. He futzed around for a half hour or so and then said, sorry. Not possible. 
See ya!
>    
>   No love for Macs here. They made a fool of us in investigations. The police force 
eventually booted the Mac network and installed Microsoft.
>    

I can understand your frustration - but why isn't your IT manager being 
sweated under the bright lights in a back-room? If anyone is to blame for
the cock-up, he is. But it's the way of the world - he probably got a large 
end-of-year bonus for 'curing' the disaster he should bear responsibility for.

I'd have thought that for a large, flexible network it'd be better to go for a 
proven, easily customisable system. It's no accident that UNIX and its 
derivatives have been around for decades. Better suited to the task than
a Macs/Vax lash-up and much, much better than the notoriously crashable, 
hackable, virus magnet that is Windows.

Still, everyone to their own.
I switched 3 years ago and since then: 
crashes - 0; 
lock-outs - 0; 
viruses - 0;
spy-bots - 0.
Suits me fine.

Kneasy